I have been out of town and just today accessed a message from the folks at MLS headquarters where they announced that Classic will be completely discontinued at the end of January. I am hoping they will have something to replace the current opening screen where you have the bishopric, hours of meetings, opening message, etc. The Tools available on the new site are great but none will cover this.....

zaneclark wrote:I have been out of town and just today accessed a message from the folks at MLS headquarters where they announced that Classic will be completely discontinued at the end of January. I am hoping they will have something to replace the current opening screen where you have the bishopric, hours of meetings, opening message, etc. The Tools available on the new site are great but none will cover this.....

Actually, the message said that Classic would be discontinued by the end of 2012, and maybe before.

I would really doubt that the ward's home page functionality would be replaced by a new page that soon; we haven't seen any hints that such a thing is actually in development.

zaneclark wrote:I am hoping they will have something to replace the current opening screen where you have the bishopric, hours of meetings, opening message, etc. The Tools available on the new site are great but none will cover this.....

I have read all the previous discussions on this topic but this was the first official date I had seen for the demise of classic. The September 21 message on MLS gave the date as the end of December. 2012. I was hoping that when the final date was announced, they would have something that would replace the features on Classic that we talked about in the discussions. Doesn't look too hopeful.

My first post in this thread noted that there were some features in Classic that would be missed. I have found one that I used often. As membership clerk, I often, (if I am lucky) at least get the forwarding address for move outs. Using the "Meetinghouse Locator" feature, I was able to navigate quickly to the website of the ward I needed on Classic and find the unit number in the url. I now have to use the Church Directory of Leaders to find the ward unit number. I know this might be a small thing, but it is a feature on Classic that I miss.

zaneclark wrote:Using the "Meetinghouse Locator" feature, I was able to navigate quickly to the website of the ward I needed on Classic and find the unit number in the url. I now have to use the Church Directory of Leaders to find the ward unit number. I know this might be a small thing, but it is a feature on Classic that I miss.

The Meetinghouse Locator functionality is now available (has been for a few years) on the Maps application on LDS.org. Anyone can use it -- you don't need special permissions as is required for CDOL.

Just go to Maps, and use the Find a Meetinghouse feature. Then when the ward is displayed, you can hover over the ward name and you'll see the URL that it will go to is something like "http://www.lds.org/rcmaps/#id=ward:31232"; that number after "ward:" is the unit number for that ward.

Another feature I miss: being able to easily send out email to specific wards.

I can do this now, but it takes much more effort than it used to. Before, you simply selected which wards you wanted to email, and send out the message to everyone. Best way I see to do so now is to navigate to each ward, select 'all adults' filter, and then 'send email'. Repeat for each ward that you want to send the same message to.